The first live show I ever saw was the comedy duo Cheech & Chong at Toronto’s Massey Hall, circa 1974. My buddy Frank D’Lazzaro’s older brother Ricky scored the highly coveted tickets from his biker drug dealer.
At four I was low to the ground, down with squashed lettuce leaves, oozing tomatoes, where the rotten-vegetable smell was the strongest.
Ah, I thought, graduation in the stadium. I smiled, remembering when my daughters graduated from Humphrey Middle School. I soon discovered I was wrong.
There’s an earlier flight! Running full speed through the airport, we plop our exhausted butts down for the final leg of our trans-Atlantic trip.
I’m alone when he vrooms past me with taillights bright as Christmas. Don’t go. Drive a while with me on this lonely road and let me imagine your fabulous life.
Bus-stop hung like bee-hive over sleepy township. Two women and I, five junior school kids, someone’s grandpa. The girls, careful of their gait, ironed-skirt pleats. Boys, throwing sand over each other’s shoes.
A few years ago, I was volunteering removing ivy from an area around the tool yard of Tryon State Park south of Portland Oregon. Two police cars showed up and informed me that they had a coyote with a broken back that had to be killed because the injury was fatal.
I was sailing in at five knots, leaning my back against the mast. She waved.
The abandoned hat stands beside an enormous pair of boots, behind a chain-link fence.
One member asked an interesting question of the group. “What do you think of when you think of something good?”
Quickly, I open a file and pin some words to the page, plucking them out of the silence and getting them down, getting them down. I’m pausing to flesh out my embryonic thoughts when the noise begins and footsteps clatter up the stairs.
My daughter said that once at the top, they had asked some fellow climbers about me. They were told, “Well, there’s an old man sitting on a rock, talking to everybody.”
It was a Monday, at the vet’s for the second time this month. No crying in the car, she just fell asleep.
She started experimenting with cocaine at 16 having read and watched “Less Than Zero.” It was chic. Cool. Exciting. Dangerous.
When I was six years old I made a promise with my grandpa. “I want to live to be one hundred, so you have to live to be one hundred and fifty.”
“Tighten your seat belts!” The operator gives me a once-over, bares a devilish smile, and sets the ride in motion. Wood rubs on wood as the roller coaster rumbles up to heaven. Grinds to a halt. Hovers mid-air.
I approach an employee. “I lost my gloves.” She looks into my eyes, must see a strange importance.
The freewheel snicks as I coast towards the apartments. It’s overcast and the asphalt is perfect. I lean left and right, then stand up, legs pumping, rocking the bike.
The A-Go-Go, a huge air hangar in the Dennis woods, has a dance Saturday and unbelievably, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs are playing. My parents checked out the grounds once and saw a pair of underpants. Crime site.
My daughter’s visit softened sterile surfaces of my home with a trail of mugs, plates, and debris, comforting signs of her presence. Our sympathetic bond assuaged my longing for connection, accumulated over months of pandemic isolation.